The personal blog of Mark J Daniels, mostly about his new hobby playing with Unmanned Aerial Vehicles.

Tag Archives: school

I genuinely shudder when my email client pings and the subject line reads: You have been sent a new message.

I spend a lot of my day dealing working with developers and designers to build a product that helps the pub trade manage their online presence as easily as they can. There’s one key element I’ve learned during my time doing this: keep the User Experience simple.

Services such as Google and Twitter, or the WordPress platform I write this blog on, work because the process to access their product then achieve what you wish to are extremely easy.

Log in to ParentMail – the longest you can set the cookie time out to is one month but invariably I have to log in each and every time I visit.

Choose the school my child goes to (a redundant step if there is only one child, one school; or two children, one school)

Select the email that I’ve been sent, inside which is a message asking me to download a PDF.

Download the PDF

Open the PDF, which is a letter that could have been attached to the email I was sent to my personal mail account in step 1.

As both my boys go to the same school and sometimes the same letter is sent out for each of them, I technically have to go through this process twice to read the same piece of information.

In this always connected world, where over 60% of Internet traffic is now consumed via a mobile device, there are the obligatory mobile apps for Apple and Android platforms.

But these don’t simplify the process enough. Sure, the app keeps me logged in, missing out step 3, and I’m taken straight to the relevant school, missing out step 4 above (I wonder if this would happen if there was more than one school involved) but the rest of the process stands as above.

Notifications still come through via email to my personal account, rather than a notification in my device and, most annoyingly, the app insists on forcing the device to landscape mode, which I don’t personally like. At least if I access ParentMail via the mobile browser I can see it in portrait mode comfortably.

I get that ParentMail exists to make distribution of notices much easier for the school and aims to eradicate the issue of letters not making it home or remaining in a school bag for weeks at a time, teenagers being the forgetful creatures that they are, and there are other features apparently within ParentMail that could be useful: information on Parents Evenings, for example, or the ability to notify the school of a child’s absence. I’ve used neither of these functions to date, but the process of getting to each section is not far removed from the above.

From a user’s experience, then, ParentMail is the most frustrating communication service available to me. I genuinely shudder when my email client pings and the subject line reads: You have been sent a new message.

Do any other parents feel the same way, or is there actually an easier way to get straight to the message that I haven’t found?